Pharmacy charging can be one of the most complex forms of charging. For most charges within a hospital, you have an order for a service. Upon completion of that service, a charge is created. There are some nuances like which location the patient is registered to, what status the order is in, or what type of patient the encounter is for, but those charges are often relatively easy for a hospital to build and support. These charges can be described as “true or false” for the charge to ...

For the past decade, hospital re-admissions has been a billion-dollar question that healthcare organizations and regulatory institutions have struggled to answer. When the Affordable Care Act established the Hospital Readmission Reduction Program (HRRP) in 2012 by most accounts it provided a practical framework and motivation for hospitals to target minimizing readmissions across the continuum of care. However, the addition of punitive measures for failing to meet certain re-admission thresholds...

While teaching an Excel workshop, I overheard one student say to another, “All of this information is great, but I wish Excel would do [insert function here]. It would make my job so much easier!” I could hear the frustration in her voice. I apologized for eavesdropping and said, “As a matter of fact, it does. Let me show you how.” What she needed was a Pivot Table. Being unfamiliar with the term “Pivot Table,” she never clicked on it. She had been wasting tim...

How productive are your coders? Do you have coders who sometimes forget to “finalize” their coding, resulting in unnecessary “waiting for coding” active encounter holds? It may be impossible to answer this question if you don’t have visibility around the actions and tasks assigned and worked on by your HIM department/personnel. The inability to view and track coder or HIM productivity leads to the overall inefficiency of the billing offices getting claims out the do...

The pharmacy is one of the most complicated places to work within a hospital. Hospitals can stock thousands of different drugs. These drugs are purchased from manufacturers, as well as drugs they create (combine/solutions). With all these complexities, there are many points of failure of which they must be aware. Below is a brief list of functions the pharmacy must complete daily: Take and dispense drug orders through their Electronic Health Record (EHR). Manage inventory. Mix or compo...

Are you measuring your Cerner Millennium® throughput correctly? By: David Hallberg, Vice President, Product Management With Covid-19 and the significant impact on hospital finances, many organizations are asking: how can we improve our clinicians’ delivery of care without incurring huge operational or capital expenditures? One method to make no-cost improvements is to ensure the correct number of processes are running on each Cerner Millennium® application node. 

Out with the old, in with the new. What does automated revenue cycle management look like? In the healthcare revenue cycle space, the adage “Time is money” certainly rings true.  Denials, late-charges, re-billings and inaccurate claims are all issues that contribute to delayed and diminished reimbursement. These time-consuming and manual remediation processes are considered compulsory in an industry where margins are so incredibly thin that simply foregoing missed charges ...

If you have ever seen the Abbot and Costello comedy routine “Who’s on First?” then you can understand that managing charges for patients within a hospital organization can be just as confusing. With today’s modern electronic systems, there is often a misconception that the system will “automatically” track and accurately drop all the charges from the backend. This misconception causes a drop in revenue at organizations that can often cause difficult-to-recover...

2020 Hindsight By: Christine Rorie, Regional VP of Sales As we look back on 2020, none of us could have foreseen what was coming. Our vision for 2020 was full of onsite consulting engagements, customer visits and tradeshows. All of that changed quickly in March. With the last-minute cancellation of the 2020 Annual HIMSS Conference, the reality of the virus quickly set in. Months of planning, flights and hotels were all cancelled. As a small company, we can be flexible and move quic...

Softek Celebrates 25 Years in Business Back in 1995, Softek was founded with the goal of creating better software along with uncompromised business ethics. And we’ve been doing that for our clients ever since. On our 25th Anniversary, we are grateful for everything that has led us to this point. Thank you to our founder, David Fletcher. He is passionate about what we do at Softek. He truly believes in and cares for his employees and clients. Thank you to our employees for their hard work ...

The Integrity of a Chargeable Form...Starts with the Build. Are you recognizing 100 percent of your expected charges produced by activity on clinical forms? Do you trust the integrity and internal consistency of your clinical forms to properly accommodate your organization’s workflow to produce and recognize all charges? This may be a difficult question to answer if you do not have visibility or a way to measure this type of data. Forms can be built in many ways, making the process ...

Why Getting Credit for your Work is Now More Important than Ever By: Jesse Hodes, Vice President of Sales The Covid-19 outbreak has put many businesses across the U.S. at severe financial risk. In the healthcare space alone, hospitals are losing an estimated $50 billion a month, according to the American Hospital Association, with most hospitals reporting seeing between 40 to 70 percent fewer patients from late March to early May. These staggering losses have many healthcare leaders questi...

From Training Wheels to Freewheeling I was six years old when I got a shiny pink bike for Christmas -- with training wheels. I rode my bike around our driveway for hours each day. After a few weeks, my father told me he was taking off the training wheels. I felt both excited and terrified. With training wheels, I had learned how to pedal and use the break, both of which are useless without balance. Forty-five minutes, three scrapes, and four bruises later, I rode a bike solo for the first tim...

A strange chain of events showed me how different departments view information. I was recently working with a client and showing them issues they had in their build of Millennium™ PharmNet application. These are some of the normal things reviewed: QCF issues – when converting doses based on the units of measure outlined by CMS, you need to use the Quantity Calculation Factor to convert to the correct measurements (e.g. 1 mg per 1 ml = 1 QCF). HCPCS inconsistencies ...

Are your clinical leaders involved in the financial processes of your organization? Did you know organizations with disconnected clinical and finance teams can result in thousands or even millions of dollars in missing charges?